Are good PHP developers really that hard to find?

[Beansprout]

Good luck, a higher salary should do the trick - there are competent, enthusiastic people out there somewhere (few graduate friends of mine are impressive but are in different fields + have been snapped up by London corporates) after a little (admitttedly half-hearted) effort looking for somone to work with us, and having got through abook-keeper (needed a more geeky person), I've decided the simplest option is to clone myself (minus the momentary times of stupidity)

 

[Adz]

The problem is that I'm very picky about who I employ, they have to be perfect. Because we're a small business, the salary comes directly out of myself and my partner's pockets. I don't have the time to train somebody (except in our bespoke systems) so they need to be switched on and clued up.

sist_si, the challenge is very simple but the requirements specified that the solution has to be bug free and use the least possible amount of code. Written in their language of choice, it needs to watch the log file of Exim and keep a tally of how many messages a particular IP address has sent using auth SMTP, reporting (once) when a certain threshold is reached, including a sample message where possible. The latter requires some "out of the box" thinking as you're not allowed to modify the Exim configuration. It needs whitelist functionality and should be accurate with no false positives.

I chose this particular task because it represents the kind of 'housekeeping' script that gets written on a daily basis within our company. I know this can be done in less than 2 hours because I've done it and it's currently in use. Anyone who responded that they don't have access to a Linux box or haven't heard of Exim were immediately junked. I can't hire someone who isn't capable of RTFM.

Edit: As suggested by some of the posters in this thread, I'm going to widen the net next time and not restrict it to PHP developers. My preference for PHP is only really based on my own familiarity with it and also the speed with which it's possible to deploy an application - I think 5 minutes from conception to implementation is my record.

 

[FabienO]

Well hurray for a lack of PHP Developers, I hope to one day become one. Self-taught though . Aim is to to be a junior developer by next summer. Seem feasible? Currently I am just grasping the basics. Not OOPing yet. basic logins, file upload, PHP/MySQL stuff. In fact I am currently recreating Youtube but for Gaming Images as a learning project. It's a start.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

I may be alone with this, but I've been put-off by roles that make me sit an "exam" of kinds. I'm there for an interview, I'm not there to be graded. An interview should consist of a discussion, not a one-way exam. (i.e. you finding out about them, and them finding out little - other than you grade candidates - about you.)

If you really want to see what they are like, have them sit with your existing devs for a hour or two and have the candidate give their opinion on real work. Then ask your devs what they thought of the candidate, both as a person and as a dev.

There is no substitute for real work.

 

[Beansprout]

Problem is, so many people can talk the talk.

 

[Paramount]

And you need to weed out the people who can say but can't do. I was reading an article (may have been linked from this thread actually) on how crap the majority of developers actually are. They rate themselves higher than reality.

While giving everyone an interview would be the right thing, and expected from people who are capable of the job, when theres multiple applicants you don't want to waste your time on the people trying their luck. Setting a homework or moderated task is the easiest way to do this.

 

[Imy]

Where on earth are you advertising? There are loads of good, experienced PHP5 OO devs around earning around that much or less.

I always thought we were common as muck as it's such an easy language to learn. Although I can imagine people without formal qualifications not being familiar with best coding practices.

I won't say how much I earn but it's not far off what you're offering and I've got 10 years PHP experience, (6 years commercial) with a BSc Hons degree as well as experience with a half dozen other languages and managing unix web servers.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

Problem is, so many people can talk the talk.

Hence sitting with them and doing actual work.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

And you need to weed out the people who can say but can't do. I was reading an article (may have been linked from this thread actually) on how crap the majority of developers actually are. They rate themselves higher than reality.

While giving everyone an interview would be the right thing, and expected from people who are capable of the job, when theres multiple applicants you don't want to waste your time on the people trying their luck. Setting a homework or moderated task is the easiest way to do this.

Giving a candidate "homework" doesn't resolve that. I've seen it on forums all over, including this one, where people are posting their "homework" and getting others to do it for them. This is far from weeding out the talkers from the walkers. If they are sat with you and working with you, it's impossible for them to just talk-the-talk without waking-the-walk too.

Also, it's not the easiest, it's the laziest.

 

[Imy]

I remember having to do those homework tasks for past job applications. I really resented spending valuable job hunting time on pointless tasks.

I wouldn't be against an in-interview task though as it should be designed to not take long.

 

[zetec452]

Edit: As suggested by some of the posters in this thread, I'm going to widen the net next time and not restrict it to PHP developers. My preference for PHP is only really based on my own familiarity with it and also the speed with which it's possible to deploy an application - I think 5 minutes from conception to implementation is my record.

That is a good idea. We hired our "php developer" with no previous PHP experience but a wealth of other coding experience. Needless to say it's working very well.

From my fairly limited experience (this could be a North American thing) without a decent salary your not going to get somebody good. Somebody good will contract out and earn much more money or go for a better paying job (I guess the last point is obvious ).

Fortunately for us our developer has a new born and wants a scheduled day. Unfortunately he won't be here much over 18-24 months as he'll be contracting again.

 

[BunnyKillBot]

Anyone who responded that they don't have access to a Linux box or haven't heard of Exim were immediately junked.

I can understand reducing your pool if you have a set of particularly specialist requirements, however i think you do yourself an injustice being quite so tight.

In the homework assignment all your really asking for is to parse a log file (doesn't require any knowledge of exim), do some basic stats, keep a note of the state of the log file and schedule in an update at a reasonable time interval. I know very little about linux but surely this could be achieved with crontab, or if your a super monkey edit the exim source to pipe the log output straight into your script.

Tada, potential solutions all from someone who doesnt have access to a linux box and has not heard of exim.

 

[Imy]

Here's another idea for setting a task. Pick something quite hard that really tests the developer's problem-solving skills but instead of them wasting a lot of time putting it into production, ask for the solution in pseudo-code.

I remember an old colleague of mine had to do a task for a job application where he had to write a system to find the most efficient route to pick items in a warehouse.

The input was the list of items to pick and their locations and the output was the path to take.

 

[Xelene]

The problem is the pay, I'm a good PHP Engineer, but I'm also a good Sysadmin amongst other things, but PHP work invariably pays 50% to 60% of what I would earn using ANY of my other skills.

Depends where you are based of course, but I Know I'd discard any job spec paying 30k unless I were fresh out of Uni.

 

[Slime101]

The problem is the pay, I'm a good PHP Engineer, but I'm also a good Sysadmin amongst other things, but PHP work invariably pays 50% to 60% of what I would earn using ANY of my other skills.

Depends where you are based of course, but I Know I'd discard any job spec paying 30k unless I were fresh out of Uni.

Are you kidding?

30K is almost double the average UK salery, most grads only get 18-22K and to discard a 30K salery because its too low is crackers unless you are top notch in central london!!!!

 

[NathanE]

30k is too low for a top development talent like what the OP appears to be after. Way too low.

That said, "PHP Engineer but also a sysadmin" did raise a chuckle.

You can sometimes get lucky and recruit top (but raw) graduate talent for a low price but the available pool of these is a small subset of the total.

 

[dave-lew99]

most grads only get 18-22K

Well i'm not sure about that, all the engineering grads i know (across a variety of fields), myself included were on quite a bit more than that straight out of uni.

 

[Imy]

You'll be lucky to get £18k as a grad doing a PHP job in the midlands fresh out of uni. I started off on £15.5k I think out of uni.

As you get further along your PHP career you'd be expected to learn some sysadmin stuff; specifically setting up LAMP servers, securing them and keeping them patched-up. You don't have to be an expert but some knowledge is required.

 

[Xelene]

Are you kidding?

30K is almost double the average UK salery, most grads only get 18-22K and to discard a 30K salery because its too low is crackers unless you are top notch in central london!!!!

The point I was making was that a software engineer programming PHP will get paid a lot less than a software engineer programming Java for the same skill level. The languages aren't that different - i.e. a Java programmer can code PHP and viceversa. (At least any that are worth their salt).

FWIW i'm employed by a small software company based in Central London, i'm responsible for the Product Support, IT & Training departments, do software development in PHP, Python and Java and do consultancy as both a Technical Architect and Infrastructure Architect. My employers bill my time out at £1500 a day.

 

[brainchylde]

Thanks for your comments, guys.

PaulM, it's nice to know it's not our job advert at fault! We had a developer previously who used to code in such a manner. Everything he did generally worked but it was just 'messy'. I need someone who is nerdy to the point of OCD .

I don't really fancy switching our entire platform to ASP .NET .

Was going to say - you'll find less of the 'e-commerce integrators' with this for obvious reasons (less OpenSource stuff around, more expensive to get into).

In relation to your problem re things being messy - sometimes this is a problem with the design and project lifecycle, rather than the developer.. just a possibility to consider.